A characteristics framework for Semantic Information Systems Standards

Semantic Information Systems (IS) Standards play a critical role in the development of the networked economy. While their importance is undoubted by all stakeholders—such as businesses, policy makers, researchers, developers—the current state of research leaves a number of questions unaddressed. Terminological confusion exists around the notions of “business semantics”, “business-to-business interoperability”, and “interoperability standards” amongst others. And, moreover, a comprehensive understanding about the characteristics of Semantic IS Standards is missing. The paper addresses this gap in literature by developing a characteristics framework for Semantic IS Standards. Two case studies are used to check the applicability of the framework in a “real-life” context. The framework lays the foundation for future research in an important field of the IS discipline and supports practitioners in their efforts to analyze, compare, and evaluate Semantic IS Standard

Managing semantic Grid metadata in S-OGSA

Grid resources such as data, services, and equipment, are increasingly being annotated with descriptive metadata that facilitates their discovery and their use in the context of Virtual Organizations (VO). Making such growing body of metadata explicit and available to Grid services is key to the success of the VO paradigm. In this paper we present a model and management architecture for Semantic Bindings, i.e., firstclass Grid entities that encapsulate metadata on the Grid and make it available through predictable access patterns. The model is at the core of the S-OGSA reference architecture for the Semantic Grid

Modelling electronic service systems using UML

This paper presents a profile for modelling systems of electronic services using UML. Electronic services encapsulate business services, an organisational unit focused on delivering benefit to a consumer, to enhance communication, coordination and information management. Our profile is based on a formal, workflow-oriented description of electronic services that is abstracted from particular implementation technologies. Resulting models provide the basis for a formal analysis to verify behavioural properties of services. The models can also relate services to management components, including workflow managers and Electronic Service Management Systems (ESMSs), a novel concept drawn from experience of HP Service Composer and DySCo (Dynamic Service Composer), providing the starting point for integration and implementation tasks. Their UML basis and platform-independent nature is consistent with a Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) development strategy, appropriate to the challenge of developing electronic service systems using heterogeneous technology, and incorporating legacy systems

A Semantic Grid Oriented to E-Tourism

With increasing complexity of tourism business models and tasks, there is a clear need of the next generation e-Tourism infrastructure to support flexible automation, integration, computation, storage, and collaboration. Currently several enabling technologies such as semantic Web, Web service, agent and grid computing have been applied in the different e-Tourism applications, however there is no a unified framework to be able to integrate all of them. So this paper presents a promising e-Tourism framework based on emerging semantic grid, in which a number of key design issues are discussed including architecture, ontologies structure, semantic reconciliation, service and resource discovery, role based authorization and intelligent agent. The paper finally provides the implementation of the framework.Comment: 12 PAGES, 7 Figure

A Model for Semantic IS Standards

We argue that, in order to suggest improvements of any kind to semantic information system (IS) standards, better understanding of the conceptual structure of semantic IS standard is required. This study develops a model for semantic IS standard, based on literature and expert knowledge. The model is validated by case descriptions of two particular semantic IS standards. The model shows characteristics of semantic IS standards. Some of these characteristics might become steering factors for improving the development, adoption and quality of standards, among others

A schema-based P2P network to enable publish-subscribe for multimedia content in open hypermedia systems

Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS) aim to provide efficient dissemination, adaptation and integration of hyperlinked multimedia resources. Content available in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks could add significant value to OHS provided that challenges for efficient discovery and prompt delivery of rich and up-to-date content are successfully addressed. This paper proposes an architecture that enables the operation of OHS over a P2P overlay network of OHS servers based on semantic annotation of (a) peer OHS servers and of (b) multimedia resources that can be obtained through the link services of the OHS. The architecture provides efficient resource discovery. Semantic query-based subscriptions over this P2P network can enable access to up-to-date content, while caching at certain peers enables prompt delivery of multimedia content. Advanced query resolution techniques are employed to match different parts of subscription queries (subqueries). These subscriptions can be shared among different interested peers, thus increasing the efficiency of multimedia content dissemination

Content-driven design and architecture of E-learning applications

E-learning applications combine content with learning technology systems to support the creation of content and its delivery to the learner. In the future, we can expect the distinction between learning content and its supporting infrastructure to become blurred. Content objects will interact with infrastructure services as independent objects. Our solution to the development of e-learning applications – content-driven design and architecture – is based on content-centric ontological modelling and development of architectures. Knowledge and modelling will play an important role in the development of content and architectures. Our approach integrates content with interaction (in technical and educational terms) and services (the principle organization for a system architecture), based on techniques from different fields, including software engineering, learning design, and knowledge engineering